Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi (1916-1996) always stood up to the established order — the unjust, cancerous Samurai traditions that spread through Harakiri (1962), for example. More than almost anyone else working in postwar Japanese cinema (Nagisa Oshima also comes to mind), he fearlessly took aim at organized authority. Never was this more fully realized than in his epic antiwar trilogy, The Human Condition (filmed from 1959 to 1961), screening at the Museum of Fine Arts. (Those with hardened movie-going posteriors can view the entire trilogy — all 9 hours and 47 minutes of it — over the course of one very long day, beginning at 10:30 am on the 27th.)

Brand new 35mm prints have been struck by Janus Films, so expect cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima's black-and-white widescreen "Grandscope" compositions to impress like they never could on the nearly unwatchable VHS editions that have been just about the only way to see the films until now. (My DVD screener copies appeared to be mastered from these very tapes, so feel free to say "hi" to me at the Museum on Saturday.)

Like Fires on the Plain, Kon Ichikawa's grisly antiwar masterpiece, Kobayashi's overwhelming, poetic epic based on the novel by Jumpei Gomikawa takes place in Manchuria. Part I, "No Greater Love," begins in 1943. Twenty-eight-year-old pacifist Kaji (an affecting early performance by Tatsuya Nakadai, star of Harakiri) takes on a job as manager of a mining camp in order to avoid conscription and remain with his beloved wife, Michiko (Michiyo Aratama). His efforts at reforming the inhumane working conditions are hindered by the Kempetai (military police), who force him to use Chinese POWs as slave labor. A climactic confrontation with the prisoners results in Kaji being relieved of duty and drafted for military service.

Part II, "The Road to Eternity," opens as the hardened young idealist struggles with the harsh physical and mental realities of military life. Kobayashi spent six grueling years in the Army himself, refusing promotions in protest of the war; his experiences likely fueled the intense realism on display, a pursuit all but abandoned by the time of his painterly anthology of ghostly tales, Kwaidan (1965). But here, verisimilitude serves him well, as Russian tanks roll in and a hopeless battle ensues.

Concluding in 1945, "A Soldier's Prayer" eventually finds a broken and starving Kaji rotting in a Russian POW camp, accepting that selling his soul for an Army exemption has led to him being among the "murderers who wear the mask of humanism."

After almost 10 sometimes preachy melodramatic hours, you'll have shared his ordeal, his inner monologues to his wife taking hold of your heart, crushing it as he stumbles across a snow-swept Siberian landscape, each footstep closer to fate, closer to an impossible reunion: "Michiko! It won't be long now. . . . "

Art in America The legend of the Old West's cowboys and Indians, flinty pioneers and buffalo killers, sheriffs and gunslingers started with the tall tales that cowboys themselves told of their glorious exploits.

Break on through (to the other side) Rachel Perry Welty sees art where many of us see annoying little things to be thrown away or deleted: the funny-shaped plastic tabs cleverly invented to close the bag around a loaf of bread; the identifying stickers found on most fruit; answering-machine messages left at wrong numbers.

Cube root "I've been told it's the largest single piece of glass in the world," Helen Molesworth, the Institute of Contemporary Art's new chief curator, said at a press preview last week.

Alternative universe In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.

2009: The year in art The year started off with a kick in the teeth when, in January, Brandeis University announced plans to shutter its Rose Art Museum and sell off its masterpieces.

High concept The stars of the “Artadia Boston” exhibit at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery are Raúl González’s manic-Injun drawings.

Power plays Some weeks back, I got to listen to Brown University archæology professor Stephen Houston pronounce the throaty, staccato sounds of Maya hieroglyphs carved across a six-foot-wide limestone panel.

Stone age The works range from the ninth to the seventh century BC, when Assyria dominated the Near East, ruling lands from present-day Iran to Israel to Egypt.

Review: Herb and Dorothy Over a 50-year marriage in a cramped, pet-filled New York City apartment, Herb and Dorothy Vogel amassed a multi-million-dollar 4800-piece collection of contemporary art.

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